shadow

On July 4th, the Dial B for Burbank site finished its epic, online “The Shadow Knows” documentary, and it is absolutely spectacular. This 10-chapter, 2-hour Quicktime movie traces the character’s entire history in print, radio, and film and pays tribute to Walter B. Gibson (a.k.a. Maxwell Grant) and all of the other artists involved in the Shadow’s creation and evolution. In addition to its professional presentation, the video and audio quality are excellent, and it can be downloaded chapter-by-chapter or as one large 587 MB file.

On Dec. 11th, Columbia Pictures announced that it will be making a new film featuring the most legendary pulp hero of all, the Shadow. The film will be produced by Sam Raimi and directed by Siavash Farahani, who also wrote the script. If the franchise takes off, word is that a Doc Savage film may not be far behind. This coincides with the recent re-printing, after decades of inactivity, of the original Street and Smith Shadow and Doc Savage pulp magazines:

I’ll admit this all seems like good news for pulp fiction fans (unless the new Shadow movie is as flawed as the one released in 1994), but I feel more than apprehensive. Conde Nast currently retains the rights to all of the Street and Smith pulps and is a poster child for everything that is wrong with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For years, Conde Nast refused to reprint any old pulps but has always been exceedingly diligent and eager to take legal action against anyone who attempted to make this material available on the Web. The most loathsome example of this is their recent legal dismantling of David Moynihan’s Blackmask Online archive of etexts. It is appalling that such an irresponsible administration of copyright should be legally sanctioned, and it raises the question–If the original authors were only paid pennies per word by a publisher that no longer even exists, whose rights are actually being protected, here? I would prefer to avoid patronizing Conde Nast.